Archive

Public-records laws are designed to ensure that constituents and journalists have access to information on public affairs. They protect a bedrock value of our democracy: transparency. Read More

The ACLU Foundation of Northern California filed a religious-liberty lawsuit seeking injunctive relief to end the Fresno County Sheriff's policy that denies people held in Fresno County jails access to food that complies with their religious dietary restrictions. Read More

For communities of color, surveillance isn't just an invasion of personal privacy, it’s a tool for high tech racial profiling that can have disastrous and fatal consequences. Read More

Download the Summer 2015 ACLU of Northern California Newsletter and read about our latest events and initiatives. Read More

Download the 2014 Year in Review. 

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All adult Californians have a constitutional right to vote except while they are “imprisoned or on parole for conviction of a felony” or are mentally incompetent. But the California Secretary of State has expanded this exclusion to include people who are neither imprisoned nor on parole but are on new forms of community supervision created by California’s 2011 Criminal Justice Realignment Act. As ... Read More

According to documents recently obtained by The Intercept in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the government is surveilling the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Read More

By withdrawing a voting rights challenge that was taken up by his predecessor, on Aug. 4, 2014, Secretary of State Alex Padilla sent the nation a message that California will not stand for discrimination in voting and that he will fight to protect the right to vote for all eligible Californians. Read More

A federal district court held that the government must obtain a warrant to obtain historical cell phone location data. This important ruling makes it clear that we don’t have to give up privacy to participate in modern society. Read More

Sandra Bland had a constitutional right to give her arresting officer the middle finger. She could have even told him to f*** off. Nothing in the law prevented her from being rude. Read More